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Comment

I don't see this as cheating, all cpus will throttle if their thermal specs are exceeded.

The thermal specs should not be exceeded when the CPU is running at its advertised normal speed. If it does it is mislabelled and should be sold as lower-spec modell that runs at a speed it can bear without having to downclock itself when used as intended.

Comment

The thermal specs should not be exceeded when the CPU is running at its advertised normal speed. If it does it is mislabelled and should be sold as lower-spec modell that runs at a speed it can bear without having to downclock itself when used as intended.

The thermal specs are given for a specific ambient temperature. Running a processor at it's advertised normal speed in winter in northern Scotland and mid-summer in southern Spain will likely result in very different temperatures for the same workload.

Comment

I think it's a case of consumer vs server workload. Consumer cpus (or gpus, see furmark) are not assumed to run at 100% for hours, so they're not thermally specced to withstand that, so that marketing can claim higher default numbers.

Server cpus typically are specced for such workloads.

Whether this is false advertising for consumer items is up for debate.

Comment

I think it's a case of consumer vs server workload. Consumer cpus (or gpus, see furmark) are not assumed to run at 100% for hours, so they're not thermally specced to withstand that, so that marketing can claim higher default numbers.

Server cpus typically are specced for such workloads.

Whether this is false advertising for consumer items is up for debate.

My consumer Phenom II X6 (125W version) can run under 100% load for hours without downclocking itself, the same is true for my laptop's Athlon QL-66 and was true for my former Core 2 Quads (Q6600 and Q9550) and Athlon X2 5200+ and any CPU I used before that.
I can't see any reason why I should expect it to be different with newer CPUs, consumer or not. If a CPU is advertised as 3.8GHz model it has to run 3.8GHz, not 3.4GHz.

Comment

I don't think it is a good hardware design when the cpu consumes by default too much power that it has to lower clockspeeds on certain loads. Intel has power saving cpus as well, there the default clock is lower by default - the rest is done using turbo steps (for i5+). Turbo boost has of course a power usage limit (can be set in firmware for oc). So basically AMD should rebrand the cpus and use a lower default and more turbo steps. A cpu that does not run a specified speed under all loads is a joke.